


The Answer Is That She Doesn't

by Coffin Liqueur (orphan_account)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, Post-Canon, Trying To Come To Terms With Being A Kinda-Reformed Antagonist, implied mutual pining, oh how the turntables
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24357754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: Luna helps Draco learn a very important lesson that it takes him some time to come to terms with.
Relationships: Luna Lovegood/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37
Collections: Villain of My Own Story Exchange 2020





	The Answer Is That She Doesn't

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melacka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melacka/gifts).



“There are other things, you know,” Luna told him, having caught him alone in a Great Hall rendered all but empty and filled with new ghosts trailing after semblance of celebration. “Better things.”

She hadn’t assumed that he would easily understand.

She was at this point accustomed to others having difficulty with regards to such things with her, in particular, however much they thought her a fool. It hadn’t prevented her from having friends now.

Indeed, he flinched once she said it, and actually tore his eyes from where his mother and father had drifted aside to a close huddle with a pair of older witches and looked at her, and processed that she had appeared beside him - as if she had poked him in the nose with the scent of an unusual flower on her fingertip.

Malfoy was hard-eyed, yet with only half the disgust she had seen him regard most others who were not housemates up until this day. He really looked at the hem of her robes before his eyes traveled up to her face, and really looked at it, too.

That half-a-look that was not scrutiny, she supposed, was caution.

She wished to smile, but assumed that it would in fact be more reassuring if she simply didn’t move. Allow him to take things in.

His lips thinned and he scowled, then he looked at the ground again, and then back just below her eyes, which, in honoring her intent, she was making sure not to blink.

A tiny cough, and then a tiny, tiny, stiff, “...Such as?”

She wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. In her head, what she had said had spoken for itself, and her eyes traveled up to the vaulted ceiling, searching for mysteries and the particulars of her statement in the cracks opening it up to a freshly-blue sky, new and yet making the hall look like an old ruin.

“Such as learning not to mind,” she finally decided. Her voice was filled with air, much like the statement itself was, being a thought which was less precise than what she’d first said; it lifted off like a balloon, or a question, in the end, carried off by its own wind.

And he scoffed, tossing his head like a Twindling Watersteed. (She had never seen one personally, but she could imagine how one would move from Dad’s illustrations.) He turned away in a single small, shoe-scuffing half-pivoting step back, his face now fixedly turned to the floor.

Her head fell cocked, as she tried vaguely to make it out.

It was difficult in the shadows cast from the sunshafts above. She blinked slowly.

“It may be very lonely if you don’t keep changing your mind,” she said, just as slowly.

She saw something in his face twist.

“...Stop speaking in riddles,” he said. “Save your breath, leave me alone.”

“It’s _not_ a riddle.” She allowed the _'not'_ to peak her voice, innocently. She shook her head, twiny threads of hair swaying. “I’m trying to give you nice advice.”

He lifted his head slightly, looking at her from a low angle. He looked wearily impatient.

“It sounded like you might need it now.”

He lifted it more.

For a second time, looked her dead in the face.

For a second time likewise, she didn’t change it. It was neutral. Not a blink or twitch or turn away.

The last of those was his. He lifted his head up to that ceiling, took another step back, slowly, till his back was facing her, and then he meandered forth. Another step. Another step. Another step.

All the while, dragging a long, long sigh.

No vocalization, no disdain.

Just air dragging through teeth.

Her eyebrows twitched together, ever so slightly.

She couldn’t detect that he had gotten it.

But that was okay.

After all, she couldn’t detect that he hadn’t, either. Perhaps he was contemplating it.

That would be nice.

It was her turn, now, to turn. Like an owl, she kept her head on him as she did, watching the back of his. Sadness tossed and turned in her chest, but she supposed some things weren’t meant to be rushed.

When she could no longer act quite like an owl due to her neck beginning to strain, she faced forward and went off to comfort the people who were ready to be loved by her.

* * *

Draco liked to think that many years later, he _did_ understand what Lovegood had told him.

Ever since he felt like he’d had an inkling, he absolutely could not stop thinking about it, and it was _stupid_.

He absolutely could not stop thinking about _her,_ and it was even stupider, as he’d surely by now made himself look as barking mad as everyone had thought _her_ to be in school, writing letters to a myriad of connections - black market beast traders, magizoological assistants, bloody _Hagrid_ , he was so damned desperate - asking them to get ahold of any creature with a nonsensical name that he thought he may have overheard her mention by chance, or been _told_ that she had mentioned. He only processed now that the second, despite being what he’d heard far more of, was a far more hopeless source of information. Inky-Arsed Wibble-Wobble. Sticky-Headed Doodle-Oo.

...Oh, to realize that so many things that Lovegood would have said back then, or so many things that he and the others of his House had thought that she would have said back then, sounded no more real than Blast-Ended Skrewt.

Merlin’s beard, how he had… _hated_ Hagrid’s class, as much as he had hated so many others, and here he was, including him in the letters he’d been sending to impress a girl, like he was _still_ some little schoolboy.

He reminded himself now, however, that he had discerned that to be the point. The point of what Lovegood had said.

 _There were other things._ That had been her wording, right?

There were other things than his _family pride._

Fat lot of good it had gotten him. Into one hell of a good place. So many _friends_ one had after the Death Eaters’ fall rifted so many of the ranking Pureblood families. In certain cases, rendered it such that even parents and children weren’t entirely certain how to look at each other anymore.

He regularly felt as if he was one of those such cases, and thought of the terrifying things his father must have done, the likes of which he had nearly done, and seen done firsthand.

_Better things._

He had some concept of what he figured she’d meant by this, too. There were also better things than pride, at all, and yet it was so bloody hard to _feel_ this one.

He _wished_ it felt like a better thing, _learning not to mind_ that so much had changed, and that everything had come to look different, and knowing that you looked different to everyone else, too, but it was maddening.

Had him reaching out and trying to get ahold of the girl who he knew, now, knew all about the looking different to everyone else bit. Had been willing to take whatever friendship she could get even knowing that others were talking dirty about her.

Had, on that day, the _one_ that everything had changed, most certainly had to _know_ that he had been one of those people.

And had still deigned to give him that nice advice.

...Which was so ironic, now, he thought, groaning weakly, letting his quill hand rest and leaning his chin into the heel of his other hand, elbow propped on a table covered in stationery, watching an owl fly out of the adjacent window of the manor with bleary eyes.

She’d wished that he learned not to mind letting go of his pride, and accepting that everything has changed. 

Then, after he’d known her for so long to be the school’s loony. A silly fool. And himself to be a Malfoy, pure of blood and raw importance.

And now he was her _fan_. Clippings of her writings pinned up to a board in front of his desk, names of creatures and locales circled in running ink. Her, an accomplished writer. Traveler.

Him, alone in an empty manor, having done the circling. The studying. The attempting to remember what she had said so he had something worthwhile to seek her attention with. Some true value.

With or without that, he suspected, an ache in the center of his ribs, that if he tried to contact her, well…

 _...She_ was the one who would have not to mind, wasn’t she.

His brow furrowed and eyes dulled as the shadow of the owl in the sky grew larger. Closer. He flicked his eyes down to the parchment below him, pushed away from the desk with a suck-in of air through his nose, and folded it. Slipped it into an envelope. Half-heartedly scrawled a name and placed his seal.

The owl landed on the windowsill with the light clack of claws. His eyes shifted to it, and he bit one lip gently through the other. It had a letter in its beak.

He took it. Returned to his desk and hunched over it to inspect it. His name was written on it in loose and flyaway script. He tilted his head.

Flipped it over - a sharp flapping movement - with a turn of the wrist.

And his brow lifted high.

Across one corner were doodles of moons with faces, in various phases.

They were smiling.

It felt very, very important.

His heart fluttered, and he dropped the letter to the desk to tear it open with suddenly trembling hands, eyes flickering between the wall of notes before him and those moons.


End file.
